From The Guardian, July 23 2008
Jonathan Jones reviews the Hadrian exhibiton at the BM

Roman art has had poor press since the 18th century. In the days of the Renaissance, when Europeans kindled modern culture by reviving the heritage of classical antiquity, no one was too worried whether statues dug up in the cluttered soil of Rome were Greek or Roman. But as soon as scholars such as JJ Winckelmann identified periods and styles, it became conventional to see Roman art as a poor pastiche of ancient Greek originals. This terrific exhibition rights a wrong and puts paid to a cliche. It shows that Roman art abounds in humanity, character and life. The empire strikes back.

The first things that hold you are portraits of the emperor Hadrian as a young man with sideburns, before he grew the beard that became his personal style; the show teems with portraits of this man. In comparing them, you start to glimpse the human behind the stone. But it's not just the emperor who comes to life. A bronze figure of Hadrian in armour, from Israel, stands near cases that display the relics of Jewish rebels his army crushed. Hadrian has a violent battle scene on his breastplate; in the cases are Jewish refugees' door keys, kept in expectation that they would soon be going home. The modern echoes are eerie. Yet this is just one part of the show's world of olive oil magnates, bricklayers and Dionysian revellers.

A fantastic marble faun from Hadrian's Tivoli villa gives a glimpse of the sensual excess of Roman life. But most haunting of all is the face of Hadrian's male lover, Antinous, sculpted on statues of gods and heroes - through which the emperor mourned his companion - including a vast, yet achingly erotic head of a Bacchic divinity.

So many exhibitions talk big then give you a few casts and copies and wall texts. This show delivers: it is an archaeological treasury whose beauty is the result of exceptional loans of some of the supreme works of Roman art from the Capitoline and Vatican museums in Rome, the Louvre in Paris, and new archaeological finds such as a colossus of Hadrian, excavated recently in Turkey. There are handwritten letters from the Jewish rebel leader Simon Bar Kokhba, and a papyrus fragment on which is written the Alexandrian poet Pankrates's celebration of a lion hunt where Hadrian deliberately missed his own shot, in order "to test to the full the sureness of aim/ Of his beauteous Antinous".

The Romans lived as if history were a book that concerned them - they displayed their flaws and crimes as proof that they belonged on its pages. The darkest stories and judgments on them are to be found in their own histories: see this, then read the Annals of Tacitus. This exhibition has the realism and the grandeur you find in Tacitus. Under the blue dome of the Victorian Reading Room inspired by Hadrian's architectural masterpiece, the Pantheon, Roman art at long last gets its triumph.

From The Times July 16, 2008
Hadrian at the British Museum

Rachel Campbell-Johnston

We all know the wall: that long line of stone that rises and falls across rough northern landscapes. It is one of the wildest and loveliest of our tourist spots. But the Romans who once paced its bleak ramparts with their spiked wooden pila were protecting the northernmost perimeter of the world's greatest empire: the empire that - stretching from Scotland to the Sahara, from the Atlantic to the Euphrates - was ruled from AD117 to AD138 by Hadrian.

But what do we know about him? The British Museum, fresh from a success in which a posse of terracotta warriors ousted Blackpool Pleasure Beach from the top of our list of favourite cultural attractions, now turns its attention from China's first emperor to another great wall-builder. In Hadrian: Empire and Conflict, it invites us to speculate on what this most fascinating and complex emperor might really have been like.

This is a show that Gordon Brown should go to see. It follows the progress of an ambitious but prudent second-in-command who finally gets to power by being adopted by his predecessor, the Emperor Trajan, on his deathbed. But leadership, Hadrian discovers, is far from plain sailing. Trajan may have been a warrior hero, but things were very over-stretched. Although the effects had not yet reached the public, the empire had been brought almost to breaking point by a war in the Middle East.

Hadrian was no ditherer. He dealt with the problem decisively. He ordered a swift withdrawal of troops in what was only the first of the many military, legal and economic reforms that, over 21 years, this emperor was to effect. The historian Edward Gibbon may have interpreted his retraction as the moment that the rot set in, but the final decline of empire was still a long way in coming and Hadrian's political wisdom, along with his cultural contributions (most prominent among them his architectural prowess), have left him with a reputation as one of the world's finest leaders. His achievements were outstanding. His legacy was immense.

The British Museum now assembles a spectacular show whose exhibits range from the heftiest stone pieces to the most fragile slips of papyrus with anything from portrait sculptures, through stone inscriptions and architectural models, to coins and mosaic pieces in between. Invest in the catalogue. It is a model of clarity, lavishly illustrated and relatively brief. It is the tiny details that snag the imagination: the tiny crease in the ear of Hadrian, for instance, that, apart from suggesting that he might have suffered from coronary artery disease, add a realism to the images that scattered his vast empire. Sometimes the plainest-looking exhibits carry the most momentous stories. In a stone inscription the name Syria-Palestina is used instead of Judea for the first time.

Sometimes the impact of pieces will be immediate and startling. As you look into the faces of a series of painted “mummy portraits” you feel you are staring into the eyes of the subjects that Hadrian (who, spending more than half his reign on journeys throughout the empire, must have met more of his subjects than any ruler before him) encountered. Other objects need more imaginative work. A length of lead piping must stand as a metonym for the luxury of the incredible villa at Tivoli.

Among the most appealing sections of this show is that dedicated to Antinous, the beautiful Greek boy with whom Hadrian fell in love. Curators let the museum's wonderful silver Warren Cup with its flagrant scenes of sodomy set the stage for a liaison which at that time was considered quite normal. What was odd, this show suggests, was the cult that ensued after Antinous' death in a Nile flood. The mourning Hadrian not only founded an entire new city in his honour but commemorated him in various god-like incarnations including as the Egyptian deity Osiris, who (complete with perfectly polished pectorals and loincloth bulge) meets the visitor at the entrance to this show.

Was it the depth of his grief that made Hadrian create this gay icon? The exhibition suggests another slant. Hadrian, the first emperor to sport a full Greek-style beard, was nicknamed “the Greekling” for his love of Hellenic culture. Now by celebrating this passion through the apotheosis of a Greek boy, he kept a potentially rebellious sector of society safely pacified. He made the Greeks feel an appreciated part of his empire. It was an adept political move.

Hadrian is certainly most often commemorated (in contrast to his warlike predecessor) as a cultured philosopher. He pops up again and again in this show in his many magnificent sculptural incarnations: as the toga-clad priest, the barbarian-trampling commander, the bearded peacemaker, the mighty benefactor. Which was the real person?

Our stock picture is that of the robed thinker. But the sculpture that propagated this image is re-examined in this show. The portrait head, it now appears, does not actually belong to the thinker's body. They have just been stuck together by mistaken archaeologists. This sculpture becomes a metaphor for an exhibition that sets out to break down the accepted image into its component parts and then reassemble it again.

The most haunting part of this show is that which displays objects found in the so called “cave of letters”, a rocky crevice in a parched wadi into which a group of Jewish civilians crawled. They hid there from the Romans, who were putting down their revolt with peculiar force. Here, perfectly preserved by the dry desert climate, are the objects that they salvaged before they fled, including the keys that they must have kept, hoping that they would return to their houses. They never did. They all perished. Hadrian the supposed peacemaker was also the perpetrator of a massacre that left hundreds of thousands Jews dead. And this - the only massacre for which we have written evidence - must presumably stand in as proof of the many rebellions that he quashed, including at least two in Britain.

This show has a spacious and unhurried feel. Each item is given the opportunity to speak. And the exhibition finds a particularly evocative setting in the specially adapted space of the museum's round reading room, the dome of which is a direct reflection of the Pantheon, whose spectacular rotunda - the largest un-reinforced concrete dome in the world - Hadrian pioneered.

The Pantheon was constructed as a forum for the emperor. Now, in an exhibition that occupies its 19th-century descendent, Hadrian once more discovers a stage from which to speak. The questions he asks resonate today. What price do we pay for peace?

Hadrian: Empire and Conflict is at the British Museum (020-7323 8299), July 24-October 26


From The Times, July 21 08
Roman Emperor Hadrian and the tell-tale sign of heart disease on his ear
Dr Thomas Stuttaford

Hadrian, the Roman Emperor, is returning to conquer London again. Installed as emperor in AD117, he came to Britain to crush a revolt and around AD122, as part of his campaign, he initiated the building of a 73-mile wall to keep out the troublesome Scots. This week he will be on show at the British Museum. Fortunately, as his face is carved in stone, he can't express the horror at finding that his old enemies, the Scots, are now governing England and controlling its purse-strings.

Many will know of Hadrian only because of his wall, but medical students have another reason. They have been looking at pictures of his busts for years - focusing on his ear lobes. Hadrian's lobes display marked lobar creases. These are pronounced creases running diagonally across the lobe of the ear. They are not disfiguring, but are an intriguing early sign that all may not be well with a person's coronary arterial system.

Despite Hadrian's lobar creases, plots against him and military campaigns, he lived until he was 62. Although that age doesn't now seem old, by Roman standards the emperor was an old man when he died. At first glance his life might have seemed to be less than ideal for someone possibly suffering from coronary disease. He had an aggressive and ruthless streak (he had no qualms about slaughtering 600,000 Jews), and, although considered a successful emperor, he remained unpopular with Romans.

He participated in a marriage arranged by his predecessor, the Emperor Trajan, his mentor and great uncle of his bride. The marriage wasn't a success: he was bored by his wife and preferred the company of Antinous, his young male lover. He was heartbroken when the youth drowned in mysterious circumstances in the Nile. Hadrian declared him a Roman god, erected statues to him and Antinous became a cult figure - to the fury of the early Christian Church.

However there were also features of Hadrian's lifestyle that may have compensated for the stresses of his home and professional life and possibly a genetic tendency to arterial disease. In his early years he had lived a vigorous physical life during his military duties. Later, once he had been joined by Antinous, he became an enthusiastic and active hunter; and he had an intense love of the arts. He was also an avid traveller, which helped to keep his empire together and gave him a respite from the politicking of Rome, but he maintained his Mediterranean diet. The diet is rich in olive oil, fresh fruit, fish and vegetables and accompanied by wine. The Roman Army always acknowledged the medicinal qualities of wine and valued them so highly that wine was provided for the soldiers during all their campaigns. Equally good care was also taken to deny the barbarians access to wine, which was found to be good for morale, nourishing and helped to counter infections.

Chest pain is a rather more constant and reliable early sign of heart disease than lobar creases. Even so the difference between the pain of angina or a coronary thrombosis and other causes of chest pain is still not always recognised. Recently there was an interesting account in the press in which the author described his chest pain. It didn't sound anginal, but it had the power to terrify the writer, his girlfriend and the emergency services. Anginal pain is a tight, heavy, constricting pain often across the whole chest but centred behind the breast bone. It grips the chest so tightly that patients say that it feels as if they have a metal band around their chest that is progressively tightened and seems to squeeze the life out of them.

The heaviness and crushing sensation felt over the chest after a coronary is likened to having a bag of concrete dropped on to the sufferer or a feeling akin to that which tortured martyrs must have felt when they were being crushed to death beneath a heavy door. The pain of a coronary thrombosis is not sharp, intermittent, stabbing or knife-like.

If the chest pain is caused by angina - spasm in the coronary arteries and relatively short lived - rather than a coronary, it is relieved by glycerol trinitrate. One of the initial signs of coronary disease is not chest pain, which tends to occur later, but increasing impotence.






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